Named Grant:

ICRF-Glazer Foundation Research Professorship Grant

About the Investigator:

Rotem Karni, PhD, a native of Israel, is Professor and Chair of the Dept. of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in the Institute for Medical Research at the Hebrew University/Hadassah Medical School. He began his academic career at the Hebrew University, where he received his PhD degree. Then, as a postdoctoral fellow at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, he started to study the role of RNA in cancer. In 2008, he returned to the Hebrew University, where he studies the role of RNA processing in human diseases and develops RNA-based therapies.

About the Research:

In the past decade, there has been a true revolution in RNA therapeutics. Several RNA-based therapies have been approved for the treatment of genetic diseases. In addition, the past year has shown us that mRNA vaccines can be the answer to a worldwide pandemic. However, RNA therapies in clinical oncology are lagging behind.

Many RNAs must undergo regulated alterations in structure and sequence in order to be useful to the cell, in a process referred to as RNA processing. Professor Karni’s research group has made major advances in the understanding of the role of RNA processing in cancer. They and others have established that specific alterations in RNA processing are a hallmark of cancer, making this process a good target for anti-cancer therapy. The Karni laboratory has developed tools and model systems to modulate RNA processing, both in cells and in animals. They plan to use these tools to study the molecular mechanisms by which RNA processing is involved in cancer initiation and progression, with the ultimate goal of developing effective and potent anti-cancer treatments based on this knowledge. The combination of their approach and recent success of RNA therapeutics in treatment of other diseases makes this a real possibility.